William Ouchi has been one of Joel Klein’s paid consultants, and one of the architects of his weighted student funding (WSF). So, let’s take a close look at what Mr. Ouchi has to say about the WSF scheme in the March 6, 2007 edition of the New York Times.
In Boston, just 20 of the hundreds of public schools use WSF. Still, Ouchi points to Boston schools as an example of WSF success. Ouchi says, “The results have been good. In Boston…scores on state tests…are 30 to 50 percent higher than they are at the regular public schools with similar student bodies.”
But here’s what the most recent on-line data I could find says about Boston’s WSF schools:
1. They serve substantially fewer poverty (free lunch) students (61% K-12, as opposed to 78% in the overall school population).
2. They serve substantially fewer ELL kids (3.8% as opposed to 15.8)
3. They serve substantially fewer regular special education kids (1.7% as opposed to 9.8%) .
4. For high school admissions, students are selected. Students do not need good grades to be admitted, but these schools do “have special admissions processes that screen for fit and commitment to the school’s philosophy.”
5. There seems to be some kind of student selection in middle and elementary as well. For example, I already noted that WSF schools serve fewer poverty students, but the disparity is especially glaring in elementary school. 84% of kids in other Boston elementary schools qualify for “free lunch,” but in the WSF schools that number drops to 53%. According to the source for all of the above data, “the student assignment process is the same for Pilot elementary and middle schools as for all schools” in Boston, but it is unclear what that means. (Source for data: http://www.ccebos.org/pilots.faring.2004.pdf
6. Boston has recognized the need for a collaborative environment. According to an FAQ on the BTU website, “the governing boards of the pilot schools must have at least four teacher-members.” (BTU.org)
So much for Boston.
Besides Boston, Ouchi mentions Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, St. Paul, and Edmonton (in Canada) as cities he has studied, the implication being that these cities have had success with WSF. For these cities, Ouchi offers no “outcomes” (score) data – the kind of data that Klein has insisted must drive the system . Still, I tried to look them up. In my travels through the internet, I was unable to find favorable score data to support WSF. Perhaps it is out there somewhere, but I could not find it. Here, however, is what I did find:
1. Oakland appears to be in the first year of the program.
2. Using Ouchi’s own data, we see that Houston had elevated scores before WSF. In a 2003 paper, Ouchi compares Houston to the LA public schools. According to Ouchi, this is a useful comparison because Houston uses the same standardized test as LA, and has similar demographics. The big difference between the two cities is the funding formula. LA uses a funding formula similar to our own, while Houston uses WSF. The results? Ouchi notes that Houston does better than LA. However, as his graphs show, Houston is outperforming LA at least as early as 1999. WSF comes to Houston a year later, in 2000. http://www.williamouchi.com/docs/primary_secondary.pdf
3. San Francisco and Houston: I can’t find the needed score data for either city, but whatever it shows, schools in these cities are not penalized for hiring experienced teachers whose qualities might blend well with the school’s environment. These systems (at no additional cost) keep salary considerations neutral. In NY, on the other hand, principals will be effectively penalized for hiring any teacher that is not brand new. With the teacher experience and quality piece so different, data from these schools is not relevant.
4. Edmonton, Canada – 200 schools, 80,000 students, not nearly our diversity, or our issues. Too many variables to make comparisons.
5. Chicago – if they have WSF, it must be fairly new. In his 2003 paper, Ouchi uses Chicago as an example of a system with a funding system like ours. (Interestingly enough, in the same paper, Ouchi concludes that at least in terms of getting more money from central offices to the schools, WSF schools are no more effective than traditional schools.
6. Seattle – enrolls 44,000 students, not the 1.1 million of New York City. Scores declined for the first two years after the funding was implemented. If there is good data out there since then, I have not seen it.
What would good data be? Well, let’s use the data Klein loves most. Take all the test scores, grind out the variables and then see how have students in WSF systems compare with students in their states who took the same tests.
Klein says decisions must be data driven. He has spent that 80 million dollars out of the public coffers so he can slice and dice the data (such as it is) produced by high-stakes tests and then use whatever’s left to “drive instructional decisions” (i.e., which test prep book to teach from, which principals to fire, which schools to close). But if data matters when it comes to everything (and everyone) else, then why does Klein hold himself exempt when it comes to funding changes that Ouchi himself has said would “radically alter” our schools?
6 Comments:
1 institutional memory
· Mar 13, 2007 at 9:54 am
THEY REPORT, YOU DECIDE (AAARGH!)
The following article appeared in the New York Post. March 13. (I would surely prefer to cite the Times or the News, but neither of them saw fit to mention the event. Score one rare point for the truthy Post.)
“City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. devoured Schools Chancellor Joel Klein at breakfast yesterday.
“With the chancellor sitting just a few feet away, the fiscal watchdog ripped the Department of Education as ‘a high-risk investment’ before dozens of public-school principals at a breakfast forum on fiscal accountability in education.
“In a no-holds-barred evisceration of the department’s business practices, Thompson portrayed the agency as one in the midst of a corporate back-room, free-for-all spending spree with none of the accountability to the public that it demands of its schools.
“He accused the department of exploiting ‘a gray area’ in state procurement law that allows it to strike no-bid contracts with impunity, and suggested the latest effort to restructure the school system will not yield significant gains.
“‘The people of New York City have a right to expect better fiscal management from those who run our educational system,’ Thompson, considered a 2009 mayoral candidate, said at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education.
“Klein shrugged off the verbal assault as ‘all old news.’
“He also defended the restructuring, which is meant to give principals more authority over their budgets and curriculum, as a means toward pumping more money into classrooms.”
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If the Chancellor has his way, his “restructuring” will, ultimately, have the effect of transforming the DOE into subsidiaries of Edison, McGraw-Hill, and Princeton Review.
Where do we sign up to get an advance copy of that IPO?
2 BernalKC
· Mar 13, 2007 at 2:11 pm
The data from SFUSD is readily available to anyone with the slightest interest. Since the adoption of WSF test-measured results have shown steady, substantial improvement. There are many factors influencing this improvement besides WSF, but WSF has been an important agent of change.
The fact that you dismiss it because SF’s WSF implementation uses averaged teacher salaries is interesting. Is you main objection to WSF in NY because of the use of true salaries?
Do you really believe that true cost accounting penalizes schools with experienced teachers? That woould seem to indicate you think experienced teachers are overpayed. The fact is that a principal would be a fool to stack his payroll with rookie teachers. He/she would fail. So he/she would be careful to blend experience and youth and — in all likelihood — end up with pretty average salaries.
Here is SF the use of averaged salaries is an arrangement negotiated with the union. It preserves the main value of WSF — increased site autonomy and enhaced site-based decision making — without intersecting with the thorny issues of pay scales and hiring rules. And it works, even if you choose to ignore the ample evidence.
One more fact to chew on: if SF were to use actual salaries, the schools that would be most negatively impacted would be the thriving, successful schools that serve the less disadvantaged students. The experienced teachers tend to gravitate to the schools that are doing well. These schools simply could not afford to keep their staff intact if they had to pay the true costs. We are searching for ways to alleviate this inequity here. I don’t really think moving WSF to true-cost salary budgeting is the answer. But that hardly invalidates our experience with WSF.
3 jd2718
· Mar 13, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I am suspicious of every move that Bloomberg and his chancellor are proposing – we have no reason to trust their motivation, we have no reason to trust their commitment to public education, we have no reason to trust in their competence.
In particular, they propose that schools will be charged the actual cost of their teachers.
Read that carefully. Schools will be given financial incentive to shun experienced teachers.
Under those circumstances, I feel no incentive to discuss the merits and demerits of WSF. We have more important business.
Jonathan
4 Jackie Bennett
· Mar 13, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I received an email from Mr. Ouchi this afternoon (a very courteous one, I might add) which mentioned that he is not a paid consultant to Joel Klein, but rather is working pro-bono, and even picks up his own expenses.
I apologized to him for that error, and I want to correct that here. In the Times article he had added a disclosure saying he was an advisor to Klein, and I made an incorrect assumption based on that.
5 paulrubin
· Mar 13, 2007 at 11:07 pm
I wouldn’t worry too much about this plan to make experienced teachers too much more expensive than rookies. There aren’t enough experienced teachers left in the system. I look around and see everyone in their 20’s and 30’s with a few veterans who are focused primarily on getting the hell out while the gettin’ is good. I’m one of the rarities, 25 years in the system but still 9 years from retirement in a best case scenario. There’s literally nobody in my building in that boat. They either have way less years cause teaching is a second career or they’re newbies, or they’re on the verge of retirement and it really doesn’t matter.
We all know that none of this is going to make a real statistical difference. It’s change for change sake and we need to patiently ride out the remainder of the Bloomberg term and focus our efforts on developing a true pro-public education candidate that has a chance at winning election. The rest is nonsense.
6 jd2718
· Mar 14, 2007 at 12:05 am
Paul,
as they phase out large schools (which they are still doing, and which we should be doing more to hinder), experienced teachers are forced to look for placement, and these teachers have tended to stay with the schools they have worked in for a long time. Their difficulty finding placement is a real concern, and that’s today, under Open Market, without their salaries being billed to the schools.
I understand that there are far fewer senior teachers than in the past, but some of those who are left will be looking for new placement, not out of choice, and this funding proposal encourages principals to discriminate against them, as if there weren’t already a problem.
Jonathan